Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

by Barbara Ehrenreich

So if you wonder why Americans are so obese, consider the fact that waitresses both express their humanity and earn their tips through the covert distribution of fats.

Cooks want to prepare tasty meals, servers want to serve them graciously, but managers are there for only one reason—to make sure that money is made for some theoretical entity, the corporation, which exists far away in Chicago or New York, if a corporation can be said to have a physical existence at

In poverty, as in certain propositions in physics, starting conditions are everything.

Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself. I don’t know why the antismoking crusaders have never grasped the element of defiant self-nurturance that makes the habit so endearing to its victims—as if, in the American workplace, the only thing people have to call their own is the tumors they are nourishing and the spare moments they devote to feeding them.

“I don’t mind, really, because I guess I’m a simple person, and I don’t want what they have. I mean, it’s nothing to me. But what I would like is to be able to take a day off now and then . . . if I had to . . . and still be able to buy groceries the next day.”

What you see—highways, parking lots, stores—is all there is, or all that’s left to us here in the reign of globalized, totalized, paved-over, corporatized everything.

true. Wal-Mart’s appetite for human flesh is insatiable;

I have been discovering a great truth about low-wage work and probably a lot of medium-wage work, too—that nothing happens, or rather the same thing always happens, which amounts, day after day, to nothing.

What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you’re actually selling is your life.

I still think we could have done something, she and I, if I could have afforded to work at Wal-Mart a little longer.

Studies show that preemployment testing does not lower absenteeism, accidents, or turnover

In 1990, the federal government spent $11.7 million to test 29,000 federal employees. Since only 153 tested positive, the cost of detecting a single drug user was $77,000.

so. The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly “unskilled.”

Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high.

The larger society seems to be caught up in a similar cycle: cutting public services for the poor, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the “social wage,” while investing ever more heavily in prisons and cops.

The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor,